Binance to Remove FLOW/BTC Spot Trading Pair after Flow Exploit Report

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced a change in its policies related to trading and monitoring following a $3.9 million exploit of the Flow blockchain last week.

In a Friday announcement, Binance said it would remove nine spot trading pairs from the exchange beginning on Saturday, including one for Flow (FLOW)/Bitcoin (BTC). In a separate notice, the company included FLOW and three other tokens on its monitoring tag list.

The tag is featured in tokens exhibiting โ€œnotably higher volatility and risks compared to other listed tokens,โ€ the exchange said, noting that tokens with the monitoring tag are at a high risk of no longer meeting listing standards.

Binance added four new tokens to its monitoring tag list on Friday. Source: Binance

Binance said the changes followed โ€œrecent reviewsโ€ of the tokens, but did not explicitly mention the Flow exploit on Saturday, which resulted in $3.9 million in crypto being stolen. Cointelegraph reached out to the exchange for comment on the exploit, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

In a preliminary post-mortem report on the exploit, Flow said it was โ€œconcerned by one exchange’s handling of this incident,โ€ referring to an โ€œAML/KYC failureโ€ that allowed the hackers to deposit the stolen FLOW tokens, convert some to Bitcoin, and withdraw the funds. Some users speculated that, based on Flowโ€™s description, the unnamed exchange could have been Binance.

Related: No, whales are not accumulating massive amounts of Bitcoin: CryptoQuant

Flow continues with recovery plan after scrapping blockchain rollback

As of Friday, the Flow Foundation said that it was working on fully restoring the blockchain ecosystem as part of a plan to address the $3.9 million exploit. According to the platform, the only steps remaining in the plan were to address user account restoration and fraudulent token remediation.

โ€œWhat was initially projected as a sequential, multi-day process has been executed in parallel, restoring both Cadence and EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] functionality while maintaining surgical precision in removing fraudulent assets and preserving legitimate transaction history,โ€ said Flow.